Facets
by Kathryn Shadow
Summary: Seven bodies, two hearts, one love. This is the story of Rose's fight to get back to the Doctor— again. Melodramatic summary over, this is a Journey's End fixit. MAJOR spoilers for series 4 finale. Extra-long first chapter! :D
1. Rose

I love Eight. I love him. I love him I love him I love him. I LOVE HIM!! -runs around squeeing-

**Disclaimer: **When TCASM takes over the BBC, she says she'll let me write for Doctor Who. But even if she does manage to get around to doing all that, I won't own anything.

SIAPNIAN: If you haven't yet, go to Youtube and look up the Doctor Who Confidential version of the snog in Journey's End, because it is SO much better than the one we got.

**Non-Warning: **Betad by the wonderful and talented TCASM, as Sister of Mine hasn't been online for the last few days and Kate's forum isn't exactly the busiest of websites. -minor glare at Sister of Mine and random people-

**WARNING (in case you didn't get the first one): **MAJOR spoilers for Journey's End.

-BAD WOLF-

Not fair. Not fair. Not fair.

He stared intently at the green, glowing column before him, dead eyes focussing on it as he tried desperately not to remember what had happened scarcely two minutes before.

_Rose..._

He hadn't been able to say it. He couldn't. It wasn't his place to say, not any more, but he wished...

The other him had said it. The one with the human heart, he had said it, trying his best to voice emotions that could never be pinned down and described with mere words. He'd watched as Rose looked at the other him and it seemed that her very soul was swimming in her eyes.

He'd watched as Rose kissed him and he held her to him. Worse, he'd _felt _it. Felt the tremors that had wracked his body at the simple release of so much pure adoration. He'd echoed the sensations. He had felt Rose's lips burning against his, felt her arms clutching him as if she'd never let him go again, and he knew in that moment he had to leave.

It was something he could never have, he could never intrude upon, never get close to, ever.

_Rose._

He could still feel it. He still wanted to tell her how he loved her, properly, in a language no-one spoke but him.

He hadn't been able to then because he knew that in that moment he wouldn't be able to leave.

_Rose..._

-BAD WOLF-

This wasn't how it was supposed to end.

Originally, Rose was supposed to be the first to die; the Doctor would be unchanged, as untouched by Time as he always was, and she was supposed to die running. That was how it should have been.

After she last encountered the Time Lord, he'd left his copy with her, as selfless as ever. He was trying to give her his forever, to let her live the one life he would never have been able to give her otherwise.

They were supposed to die slowly, killed by Time itself, in each others' arms as their hearts stopped.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

She sobbed as she cradled him in her arms, keeping him partially upright, trying to make him stay. He lolled a little to one side, eyes flickering back and forth beneath half-closed lids as the poison deadened his nerves. His greying hair was in disarray and stained red with his own blood, which leaked from an ugly gash going from his scalp to his abdomen.

Twenty years they'd been together, and she'd never thought it would end quite like this.

Oh, she knew that there was a possibility of him being mortally wounded; when one had worked for Torchwood as long as she had, nothing of that sort was unexpected, but she hadn't... properly absorbed the simple fact that it might be like this.

Time had added creases to his face, the unquestionable sign of age subtly altering his boyish features into more sedate lines. He had less hair now, a fact which still irked him, and much of it had faded from its original deep brown colour to a silver shade, but he was still the Doctor and he wasn't supposed to die. Not forever. Not now.

But he was breathing his last, the victim of a Echnalrindiansycsarrial sting he had taken in her place.

She choked as she tried to breathe herself.

"Did I do it?" he murmured, voice trembling a little as the venom attacked his body. "Did I save you?"

"You didn't have to," she whispered back, her inner anguish making it hard to speak.

"But did I save you?" he asked, voice a little sharper now, frantic. His eyes flew open to stare deep into her own and his hand nearly crushed hers as he gripped it with urgency.

She managed to take a breath despite the paralysing spasms of her diaphragm as she fought to keep from breaking down completely. The creature may as well have managed to attack her; she felt like she was being torn apart from the inside out, her soul shattering with every passing second.

"Yeah," she managed to tell him after a moment, her voice breaking along with her heart.

He relaxed, then gasped as a seizure wracked his slender form. She could feel his heart beating erratically against her palm.

"Don't die," she begged him. "Please."

He made a strangled noise. "Rose," he gasped.

She shook. She could feel his life slipping away and tried to convince herself that it was a nightmare.

A very, very vivid nightmare.

All the tension flooded from his body as the seizure ended and his eyes slid shut, but his single human heart still beat against her fingers, slowing now as the poison took its toll.

_Thud-thud._

"I love you," she blurted just before she lost all control of her emotions, tears pouring from her stinging eyes to strike his pallid cheek, mingling with his blood as it dripped from his wounds.

_Thud-thud._

His eyes flickered open and he almost smiled.

"Rose Tyler," he murmured, inhaling shakily for the second part of what he was trying to say.

_Thud-thud._

"I..."

_Thud._

Silence.

Her eyelids closed without any conscious order and she held his broken body close to her own.

-BAD WOLF-

Life went on, contrary to popular belief. It was different now for Rose and her son and sometimes she wished that it would stop altogether, but it stubbornly continued at her.

Almost three years after he was taken from her, she heard from him again, whispering her name in her head— and she wasn't about to pass it off as her imagination, not now. Not after all that she knew the Doctor could do, all that she had _seen _him do.

"Right, um," she said, a little uncertainly. Rassilon, their sixteen-year-old son, waited, tapping absently on the door-frame as she threw some random things in a battered pack.

"How long are we going to stay?" he asked.

She glanced at him. The boy might as well have been a carbon copy of his father; his face was a little less angular, his nose a little different, but the deep brown eyes— tinted with just the slightest hint of copper— were the same. The unruly brown hair was the same. The ruthless arrogance and naïve tactlessness... They were exactly the same.

"Not long." She shouldered the pack with only slight difficulty and turned to face Rassilon.

"That said, don't get into trouble, don't blow anything up if there are people around—"

He pouted as she stepped past him, heading for the door. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him shift his own battered pack on his shoulders as she turned the handle.

"—don't go around saying you're part alien..." She turned her head to look at him. "And don't go around insulting people."

He opened his mouth.

"In English or otherwise," she interrupted with a mild glare.

He looked vaguely affronted. "I can't help it if—"

"Yes, I know the entire human race are all idiots, but don't tell them that, okay? They don't like being reminded of it."

_Rose..._

She flinched a little at the mental intrusion. Rassilon gave her a vaguely concerned glance.

"Let's go," she said.

-BAD WOLF-

"Bloody Earth technology," she muttered as she slopped through what pretty much equated to what would happen if someone took the English Channel and upended it over the country from which it got its name.

She had been forced to abandon the car, as it didn't really like having the English Channel dumped on it and promptly decided to not work any more no matter in how many languages its unfortunate occupants cursed at it. Or how clever Rassilon was in its general direction.

She could see something that looked vaguely like some sort of civilisation and sped up as the English Channel bored of destroying the long-abandoned car and started to aim for her eyes.

She squinted ahead and found that the dark shape wasn't civilisation, it was a large, metal lump on wheels which appeared to have lost everything that might have been construed as control and was now hurtling towards them with a threatening amount of speed.

Rose barely had the chance to take that in before her maternal instincts took over with a vengeance. She gave a warning cry, spinning around and pushing Rassilon away from the vehicle. He yelped in surprise as he stumbled to safety and landed in the mud.

Rose tensed, preparing to dart away from the danger herself. Her eyes locked with her son's for a single moment.

And then the large, metal lump on wheels slammed into Rose's back. There was a crunch, searing agony, and then...

...Nothing.

-BAD WOLF-

"Hello? Can you hear me?"

The somewhat irritable Rose was tempted to snap something at the misshapen blob talking to her. She nearly did, in fact, and would have had she not been dying at that moment.

She blinked up at the sky— no, ceiling. She didn't bother breathing; she knew as well as anyone else that her time was up, and it hurt anyway. If she just stayed still, it didn't hurt quite as much.

Why was it taking so long? she thought, irritated. She was dying, she was ready to go ahead and get it over with and she'd been hit very effectively with a large, out-of-control lump of metal, so why wasn't she dead yet?

"Just hold on. We'll..."

The blob's words faded into the background as she tuned them out, focussing on the rush of blood in her ears. No, they wouldn't heal her. She didn't want it. She was ready.

Wasn't she supposed to be doing something...?

Norway. Beach. Right.

"Sorry, Doctor," she murmured, a tickle racing from the corner of her mouth as blood bubbled from between her lips at her speech. "Don't think I'm gonna make it there today."

Where was Rassilon? She couldn't see anything; everything around her was distorted, blurred. She was aware only of the pain masking all her thoughts in a blood-red haze.

For the first time since the original Doctor had faded away with his love unspoken, she wanted to die. She just wanted it to end.

As if triggered by her thoughts, the world started to fade around the edges of her vision.

"It's about bloody time," she muttered before she calmly breathed her last.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose woke up, gasping, the air burning her lungs as it came. She tried to jerk upright and banged her head on something cold and metallic. Groaning, she sank back into a prone position and began to try to figure out what the hell was happening now.

She'd died. She'd seen enough people die to know what it looked like, and that was textbook death she went through back there. Oh, right, and now she appeared to be under a flimsy sheet of something-or-other and packed into a metal box, and that seemed to fit with what she'd seen as well.

"I do not believe this is heaven," she said, and froze.

Her voice sounded different. Different and familiar.

She licked her lips nervously. "Hello?" she asked, and it sounded different then too. She tried coughing and the difference stubbornly remained.

Her skin was tingly and oversensitive, like she'd just been through a dermal regenerator. Her brain felt like it was on a merry-go-round while her body was stationary and her heart fluttered oddly in her chest.

Very oddly.

Almost as if there were two of it.

She disentangled her arm from the thin sheet covering her, pressed her fingers to her neck.

_Boom-boom-boom-boom. Boom-boom-boom-boom._

She rested the palm of her hand against one side of her chest.

_Boom, boom. Boom, boom._

She moved it to the other.

_Boom, boom. Boom, boom._

"Right," she said, and was unsure of how to finish that sentence. She wasn't sure what to think of it, either; none of it made any sense. She decided to ignore it until her brain decided to stop revolving.

Why was it doing that, anyway?

_It's because you're suffocating, _said a very familiar voice helpfully. _Idiot, _she added, not quite as helpfully. _Are you really so excited about dying that you'd like to do it again?_

"Stop it," she told the other her before squirming a bit, trying to figure out a way to escape the...

She paused for a moment. She was naked, freezing and covered with something that obviously had nothing to do with warmth. Something scratchy loosely encircled the big toe of her right foot and she unconsciously twitched her leg at the irritation. The box was barely big enough for her to move at all, let alone do it in any form of comfort.

She concluded for the second time in as many minutes that she was in a morgue. That made sense. They thought she was dead.

She would just have to prove them wrong, then, she decided, and kicked at the door of her prison.

_That's the back._

"I was under the impression you were being quiet," she snapped at the first her.

_I was under the impression you were trying to escape._

Rose studiously ignored Rose 1 and tried rolling over. She wasn't quite flexible enough.

_Rose 1, _said Rose 1. _Imaginative._

"What else am I going to call you? It's our name, isn't it? How are we to differentiate ourselves?"

_In case you haven't noticed, we don't have to. There are only two of us here, we'll know who we're talking to._

Rose rolled her eyes, muttered something impolite about her former self and reached behind her, feeling something resembling the inside of a safe there. She felt around a bit and managed to trip the mechanism; apparently whoever was in possession of the morgue didn't really expect its human cadavers to be able to escape once they were dead. Either that or someone had been terrified of being buried alive.

The light flooded into the tiny capsule and Rose snapped her eyes shut against it. She squirmed out of her box backwards, nearly falling until she grabbed the door above her, hoping that her sudden and irrational fear wasn't true and said door wasn't about to open and impolitely dump a dead person on her.

Rose 1 snorted derisively at her.

"I thought I asked you to be quiet," she told her.

_I was being quiet!_

"Not at the moment."

Rose 1 fumed.

Rose glanced down and noticed that she really wasn't all that far from the ground, so she wriggled out of her prison, still holding on to the door above her to ensure that she was the right way up, before dropping easily to the floor. The white sheet they'd covered her with fell on top of her and she clumsily disentangled herself from it, struggling with fingers not quite the same shape.

She wrapped the sheet around herself for modesty's sake, as the thin scrap of scratchy fabric would do nothing to keep out the cold (Apparently they didn't think much about the comfort of those who frequented the morgue) and closed the door behind her.

She shivered in the cold as the sudden availability of oxygen cleared her mind enough for her to think, if only a little.

She had regenerated. It had to be regeneration. She had died, and suddenly she wasn't dead any more, her previous personality was arguing with her, and from what she could see her body definitely wasn't the same shape as it had been that morning.

She glanced downwards appreciatively and Rose 1 made a noise surprisingly similar to a growl.

But the point was that _she had regenerated._ She was human, surely. Surely human. How could she be anything else? She aged, didn't she? She had only one heart...

Well. Not any more, but all the same, she shouldn't be regenerating. She shouldn't be able to; when humans were dead, they _stayed _dead, and even if they didn't, they stayed in approximately the same shape. And Rose was human.

_Obviously not, _said Rose 1 irritably.

"But it cannot—"

_Look, _snapped her previous self, _you've got two hearts. You aren't the same shape as you were before you died, and I'm talking to you in our head. Are you intentionally trying to be stupid or does it come naturally now?_

Rose grit her teeth together.

_So something's happened to make us a Time Lo... Lady? Is it Time Lord or Time Lady?_

"How should I know?" muttered Rose, pulling the sheet closer as the chill continued to eat into her bones.

Rose 1 paused. _Right, sorry. Anyway, the only person who's going to figure this out is the Doctor, and in case you haven't got amnesia after all that, he was calling me to Bad Wolf Bay earlier. _She paused, and Rose felt a shiver of fear race through her first incarnation. _And we've got to find Rassilon and make sure he's all right._

Rassilon. Rose might be very different from her previous self, but he was still her son.

Suddenly feeling an intense need to escape, she glanced around the room. There was no-one there to either help or hinder her—

_Yeah, sure. It makes _so _much sense for them to guard a morgue full of dead humans._

—so, pointedly ignoring her previous self's interruptions, she set off in the approximate direction of the door, her feet padding gently on the cold tiles. A strand of hair fell over her eyes and she was considerably surprised to see that it was blonde.

Rose 1 metaphysically threw her hands up in defeat. _Figures, _she sulked.

Rose couldn't help her slight smile at her irritation. She plodded across the room, poked her head into a hall. Nothing helpful there. She went in the other direction and found a closet that contained something vaguely like one of those hospital gowns that took ten minutes to put on and never really did much for either warmth or modesty anyway.

She took it, wrapped it around herself, and totally failed to get it right. She growled a little and just left it as it was, pulling she sheet she'd awakened with around both her and the slightly less scratchy fabric.

She leaned over and twisted her leg around to pull the tag off of her toe. When she'd managed to finish that, she found herself face-to-face with a reflective bit of tile.

Both she and her past self gawped at the image for a moment.

_No,_ breathed Rose 1.

Rose was having some difficulty with the change herself.

She knew she'd regenerated, she knew what that meant, she knew she wouldn't have looked the same, but why the hell did she look like the carbon copy of Madame du Pompadour?

-BAD WOLF-

Dun dun DUN!!

...All right, so it wasn't all that dramatic or surprising.

Bit of a warning for you: I'm in Ohio right now and will remain here until Friday, so you probably won't be getting a lot of updates from me unless I luck out again and Family Members choose to eat at places with WiFi... although that's not much different from normalcy, is it? -slightly meek look-

Please review.


	2. Reinette

Just so you know, there is a perfectly logical explanation for Rose's regenerating, and it has nothing to do with the Bad Wolf.

**Disclaimer: **I own a copy of _Pride and Prejudice_, a copy of _Murder on the Orient Express, _a copy of several other random books, a copy of a Skillet CD, an Evanescence CD, and other CDs, an iPod, half of Mum's computer, a few original fiction stories I'm working on, and maybe this idea. In case you didn't notice, Doctor Who was not on that list.

**NOTE: **I've changed my mind and cut out three of Rose's future incarnations as it would take too long to assimilate their characters and they really didn't make any sense in here unless I put in some MAJOR post-regenerative amnesia. And don't worry, there will be some of that in the future. And as Rose can age (albeit at a much slower rate) and the real!Doctor can't, I think we should give her a few extra regeneration cycles, don't you? Anyway, summary's changed now, not that you care. Those who guess the three people I cut out get a jelly baby of whatever flavour/type they choose.

**Threat(ish): **I had to watch _Girl in the Fireplace _again to get Reinette's character... well, not exactly perfect, as it's hard for me to completely mimic a oneshot character... But anyway, I had to watch THAT thing again to do this, so you'd better like it! -glares-

**Request: **All information about our _dearly _beloved Reinette was derived from the aforementioned episode and a quick Wikipedia search. If I got anything wrong, PLEASE tell me. I might hate historical inconsistencies, but I'm not exactly infallible myself and the history course I'm currently taking is not only just American History, but it is also pretty much useless. A single line in Family of Blood told me more about World War I than two chapters of that thing— and no, that is not an exaggeration.

SIAPNIAN: I was originally going to post… seven chapters (Dunno. I keep fiddling about with her regenerations.), one for each incarnation, but once this started heading towards the 3,000-word mark and I was only halfway through the episode… Yeah. So I'm breaking it down into parts. And now that I've used up half the chapter on author's notes, let's get on with it, shall we?

-BAD WOLF-

No. This was wrong. Surely.

She closed her eyes, opened them again. Reinette was still there in the reflection on the tile.

She straightened up, turning around, eyes wide in shock. She'd hated Reinette, she remembered. Completely, utterly despised her.

But she _was _Reinette.

_Not me, _reminded Rose 1. _I'm completely different._

Rose sighed.

_And I dunno, this could be some sort of... really, really weird coincidence, couldn't it?_

"I don't know." Rose straightened up, pulling the gown a little more closely around her shoulders.

She didn't know much. Didn't know what to do, where to go, how to get there, didn't even know who she was.

She just knew that the Doctor was calling her, and no matter what else was happening, she had to obey.

But first, she had to get dressed.

-BAD WOLF-

It took a few minutes to find anything vaguely resembling a locker room, but she eventually located one. She grimaced at the lack of her sonic hair straightener (the Doctor's idea of a joke, she supposed; she would have much preferred a screwdriver), sat down in front of one of the lockers and glared at the little object keeping it closed.

She got up fretfully and paced down the pathway, quickly running her eyes over every locker in the hopes that someone had been careless. It was possible; the Doctor had told her once about his eighth incarnation having to do something very similar.

She smiled mirthlessly. Oh, that he had been here to assist her in this hopeless endeavour.

Her searching gaze caught a locker, the lock not quite closed, the metal door cracked open, and her eyes widened.

Perhaps not so hopeless after all.

The owner was shorter and slimmer than Rose, but at least she wouldn't draw too much attention to herself. It would do for the time being, she decided, and glided out of the room.

She hadn't fully computed the fact that passing by Rassilon on her way out was far from impossible.

He sat in one of those uncomfortable chairs they used in waiting rooms, ostensibly because those unfortunates who must sit in them would be too worried to care about comfort. He was hunched over, elbows resting on his knees. There was a paper bag, crumpled and apparently empty, resting on the floor between his feet. His face was hidden by his hair as he gazed at the small object cradled in his hands.

The sonic hair straightener.

Rose swallowed hard, her throat closing. Of course he thought she was dead. Of course he did.

The knowledge didn't make the sight easier, and she fled.

-BAD WOLF-

She was delayed by the fact that she had more experience with hitchhiking rides on spaceships than on cars, but Rose—

_Can't you call yourself Reinette and me Rose?_

—eventually managed to make it to Dårlig ulv Stranden, before the echo of the Doctor's call had faded from her mind. She pulled her fingers through her blonde hair and looked around the deserted shore.

_Rose._

She jumped at the intrusion. The Doctor might not have shown up in person, but his voice was louder now; in her head, it felt like he was just behind her.

She turned, and there was nothing there, but the renewed call now reverberated immediately in front of her and she had no choice but to follow. She limped across the damp sand, exhausted from the stress of both regeneration and more walking than she'd probably ever done.

_ROSE._

She was standing just where the TARDIS had when she'd landed here, and the voice throbbed mournfully all around her, echoing and repeating and swathing her in a warm cocoon of sound. The beach started to blur, the sea mingling with sand and sky and rock, the colours bleeding into each other until all she saw was pure gold light.

The radiance was leeched away and she fell, plummeting in the nothingness, with no light to guide her and no air to use in the scream building in her throat. A noise like a cross between static and rushing water filled her ears and she tumbled into reality.

Her wrist hit the hard floor first, then her elbow, quickly followed by the rest of her in rapid succession. For a long moment she lay there, crumpled on the ground, content to just breathe.

She pushed herself into some semblance of an upright position, wrist throbbing, hip not much better.

The first thing she noticed through the spinning in her head was that she was no longer on Dårlig ulv Stranden. She was not on any sort of beach. She was not, in fact, on anything even vaguely related to a beach. She appeared to be in someone's bedroom.

She hoped it wasn't in France. If it was in France, and she was truly Madame de Pompadour, things were going to get a little difficult.

"Reinette!" shouted someone— female— from a lower level, the voice tense, scared, and slightly hoarse. She recognised the voice, as distorted as it was by volume and fear, as the parent of the one she called.

She swallowed, waited. No-one answered.

"REINETTE!"

She swallowed again to moisten her suddenly dry throat.

"I am here, Mother," she managed to shout.

The caller ran into view, came to a halt and stared at her.

Rose stared back, focussing, pinning her in place with her gaze as she prepared to use the talent that the Doctor had so painstakingly helped her to utilise for just this sort of situation.

"I am Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson," she said, voice low and firm. The woman stilled, her weak human mind easily succumbing under the telepathically-enforced suggestion. "You are my mother." A thought struck her. "There is nothing unusual about my attire," she added.

She released the woman as soon as she felt her assent, and suddenly found herself encased in a suffocating embrace.

-BAD WOLF-

It had taken a great deal of probing, both mental and verbal, before she got anything useful out of her. Eventually she managed to discover that Reinette had gone missing earlier in the day— no-one seemed to know how or why. Rose knew, by some talent she had not had before her regeneration, that the girl was dead. She wasn't concerned; another sense, the one that wove timelines around her as if she was a maypole, told her that it did not matter. Rose had taken Reinette's place, and that was how it was meant to be.

_I still say you should call yourself Reinette._

"I still say you should keep quiet."

"Reinette!"

Rose rolled her eyes. Since her appearance, no-one seemed to want to let her out of their sight for more than a few minutes. It made bathing rather difficult— not that anyone bathed as much as she was used to anyway.

She heard a noise from behind her, the sound of gears meshing against each other.

"Reinette?" asked a different voice, the one that haunted her every moment, waking or otherwise. She felt her hearts began to speed. She almost thought it was merely her imagination, but she felt a warm burnt-orange glow against her consciousness and when she turned around, looked through the doorway of her bedroom...

"Just checking you're okay," he continued. He didn't appear to notice her, but was instead fascinated with the harp in the room.

Rose 1 was silent, drinking in the sight of him through her successor's eyes. Rose decided not to taunt her; she found she had an identical reaction.

_Guess we do have something in common, then, _said her predecessor, but there was no teasing in her voice. She was fixated on the second Gallifreyan in the room, as much as he was completely oblivious of her.

He drew his fingers across the strings and the sound reverberated gently. She stepped forwards and still he didn't turn.

She cleared her throat pointedly, and he whipped around to face her. The lack of recognition in his eyes pained her irrationally; of course he didn't know who she was. He didn't even know who she was pretending to be.

"Oh," he said, surprised. "Hello." He whipped his glasses off and stuffed them in his pocket, looking rather like a child caught in an unfavourable act. "I was just looking for... Reinette." He paused. "This is... still her room, isn't it?"

She smiled; she couldn't help it. She had missed his babbling, as much as she had told him otherwise. It was a central part of his personality, and to hear it again, see him again...

"I've been away," he continued. "Not sure how long."

"Reinette, we're ready to go," shouted the woman who thought she was her daughter.

"Go to the carriage, Mother; I shall join you there," she replied, never taking her eyes off of the Time Lord.

Recognition. Not the correct form of it, but recognition nonetheless. He was delighted, surprised... silent...

_Say something, _urged Rose 1.

She couldn't exactly run up and snog the life out of him, as much as she might want to do so; he couldn't know who she was, not yet. Not ever, in this body— at least, she didn't think so.

"It is customary, I think, to have an imaginary friend only during one's childhood," she said smoothly, still unable to keep from a smile marring her even tone of voice. "You are to be congratulated on your persistence."

Rose 1 snorted her amusement.

"Reinette," he acknowledged, smiling. "Well." His eyes flickered over her. "Goodness, how you've grown."

She could feel him reaching out to her, in her mind, and she quickly cloaked her telltale Gallifreyanness.

"And you appear not to have aged a single day," she replied, stepping forwards— perhaps a little too quickly, in this dress. She still hadn't got the hang of walking in this.

_I still haven't got the hang of not saying stuff involving the phrase "getting the hang", _said Rose 1, a little wistfully.

"That is tremendously impolite of you."

Rose 1 smirked.

"Right, yes, sorry," he said. Rose tried not to laugh; the Doctor was apologising? To her? Over such a trivial matter, something that neither of them could avoid? "Ahm, ahm, um, listen," he stuttered. He was still chasing the faint traces of her dampened telepathic signal. It was getting increasingly hard to avoid him, especially when she most definitely did not wish to do so. "Lovely to catch up, but, ehh, better be off, eh?" He paused to breathe. "Don't want your... mother finding you up here with a strange man, do we?"

Dear Lord. He was a fanboy.

"Strange?" she asked.

_How old was Reinette when he saw her first? _she hissed to her previous self.

_Dunno. Six? Seven?_

"I have known you since I was seven years old."

He paused. "Yeah," he agreed. "I s'pose you have." He grinned happily and gave a nervous laugh. "I came the quick route."

Her hand came up before she could stop it and she gently traced the contours of his face with her fingertips. His smile slipped away, falling into a more serious expression, and still she couldn't stop herself. She felt her predecessor threading out, melding their senses so that she could feel everything that Rose did. After a moment she pulled away, a question throbbing inside her mind.

_Why would Reinette touch him like that?_

She swallowed. "Well, you seem to be flesh and blood, at any rate, but this is absurd. Reason tells me that you cannot be real."

_Not to us, _said Rose 1 mournfully. _Not yet._

"Oh, pff," he said, gently chiding. "You were never one to listen to reason."

She smiled at him, content for the moment to enjoy just the sight of him, until a voice broke through their silent regard.

"Mademoiselle, your mother grows impatient!"

She fought the growl rising in her throat, but could not conceal the irritation in her voice. "A _moment!"_

She turned back to him. She tested the timelines and found that what she was tempted to do could not, would never hurt anything. There was no reason not to give in, so she did.

"So many questions," she said, truthfully enough. "So little time."

She did not bother to disentangle Rose 1 from her own senses as she pulled him down to her and snogged him. As much as her predecessor might irk her, she deserved to feel this as much as she did, and it might keep her quiet for the moment.

Surprised to say the least— she could sense the maelstrom in his burnt-orange consciousness, which momentarily gave up the chase— the Doctor backed up to avoid falling over and Rose followed. He collided with the fireplace and she collided with him, and the whirling puzzlement in his mind faded into instinct. Her hearts sped as he reached for her waist to try and pull her closer, and...

...a voice from the other room shattered the fog enveloping her double mind, returning rationality to her thoughts. He couldn't feel her duplicated pulse. She couldn't let him, not yet.

As much as it killed both of her, she pulled herself away, snatched up something from the vanity— she wasn't even sure what it was— and fled.

-BAD WOLF-

You're welcome. :)

Review, my precious-es.


	3. Reinette part II

Okay, so this isn't the full bit of Reinette's whatsitness, but whatever. It's an update, yeah?

**Disclaimer: **If I did, my friend Luke would be Eleven. I wouldn't even have to make up a personality for him, he's that Doctorish. O.o But no, I do not own it, and therefore poor Luke must be mostly-unknown and eccentric. Poor Luke.

SIAPNIAN: Blame/thank TCASM for her loveliness in prodding meh. ^.^

-BAD WOLF-

The next time he visited her, she was walking with her friend Catherine— who actually reminded her somewhat of Keisha. Her presence and her wit actually momentarily disguised the itch in her mind.

"Oh, Catherine, you are too wicked," she laughed. Rose 1 chuckled from her spot in the corner of her consciousness, but was more engaged with something on which Rose could not quite focus.

_It's the Doctor, idiot._

Rose whipped around, but saw nothing. The niggling glow in her head would not be ignored, but it was apparent that the Doctor did not wish to be observed this time.

"Oh, speaking of wicked," continued Catherine, oblivious to her friend's distraction, "I hear Madame de Châteauroux is ill and close to death."

"Yes," said Rose, schooling her voice and expression into a façade of despair. "I am devastated."

"Oh, indeed," agreed Catherine, a smile she couldn't quite conceal throwing Rose into laughter again. "I myself am frequently inconsolable."

"The King will, of course, will be requiring a new mistress."

"You love the King, of course," said Catherine.

Rose hesitated. "He is the King," she said after a moment. "And I love him with all my heart. And I look forward to meeting him." Before she could stop herself, yanked by the little telepathic impulse she should really learn to control, she had whipped her head around again in search of her Time Lord. He ducked behind one of the solid blocks that interspersed the fence at regular intervals, as if she couldn't see the flash of brown pinstripes and the sunlight reflecting off of his cream-coloured trainer as his hiding-place proved insufficient to conceal him. As if any hiding-place could mask the impossible, almost delicious tickle in the back of her mind.

This time, though, she had not been discreet enough about her glancing. Catherine saw her and paused. "Is something wrong, my dear?"

Rose struggled for words. "Not… _wrong_, no." How could the Doctor's presence be anything but perfect, anything but benevolent? And yet she couldn't have him. He wasn't hers, not yet. And yet, at the same time, he _was _hers, Time twisting and fracturing around them both as if on purpose to make her life a living hell.

"Every woman in Paris knows your ambitions," Catherine continued, attempting to modulate her voice back into a semblance of all that was casual.

"Every woman in Paris shares them," Rose retorted, a little snappishly. She felt the Doctor's eyes on her, singeing her skin; why did she have to be here, now, when he was so close and she… had to fulfil a role in history that never should have been hers?

"You know, of course, that the King is to attend—"

_Should is a funny word, _Rose 1 said, melancholy, trying to twist her successor's eyes back to the only other Gallifreyan in existence. _I mean, technically speaking, you— well, we— were always supposed to come here, and you were always Reinette, so—_

_Shut up._

-BAD WOLF-

She really didn't want to do this. He didn't even look anything like the Doctor. Anything at all.

_You could always pretend that he's a future version, _Rose 1 had told her helpfully, and she was really trying. It worked, almost, as long as she didn't look him in the eye; so she kept circling him, moving to stand behind him whenever he tried to face her. If she looked him in the eye, if she saw the bitter, shallow, empty place where the dim glitter of the Imprintur should glow, she knew her façade would crumble instantly and she would ruin everything.

Now she knew she had been in France too long. She was thinking words like _façade._

And even worse, so much worse, was the knowledge that right at this moment the Doctor was watching her. The Doctor, Mickey, and her own previous self, all watching her. She knew that the other Rose was mocking her, trying to force herself back into the Time Lord's esteem by the rather immature mangling of her honour; she knew that Mickey giggled at that, all too ready to be ridiculously amused by anything Rose happened to say. Did the Doctor care about that at all? Did he feel anything now as he watched…?

_For my own sake, I hope he didn't, _Rose 1 said darkly. _Even if I do have another third of the story._

Rose ignored her. The King left at last, off to do… whatever it was he was to do; Rose was too agitated to care. She went to the mirror that wasn't a mirror at all, placed herself where she faintly remembered the Doctor to be, and inhaled slowly. She could hear him, barely, even though the time differential made it impossible to feel him. It was strange, this amalgamation of senses; right now she felt like she had before she had regenerated in the first place, but as soon as he came through that door… she would know everything that he was thinking, if she only dared to slip deeply enough into his consciousness.

"France. It's a different planet."

She had to smile at that.

And then, with a sudden jolt of awareness, she remembered why she was here and what was about to happen. The hard, resonant, mocking tick-tocks of the clockwork creature assaulted her ears and she spun around, forcing her features into some imitation of angry fear when she had already begun to glow. Stolen her moment with him might be, but it was probably all she was going to get in this life.

"How long have you been standing there?" she demanded of it.

It didn't answer.

"Show yourself!"

Instantly responding to her order, it whipped around. She stepped back, an instinctive reaction; even though she knew no harm would come to her, the horrible emotionless mask covering the monster's featureless face stirred something inside her that she couldn't quite understand. Even though she'd lived through this before (albeit on the other side of the equation), it still… hadn't quite lost its capacity for inspiring fear, however irrational.

The Doctor's appearance was near instant. He whipped open the concealed doorway and she had to feign surprise as he passed beside her with a hurried "Hello, Reinette. Hasn't time flown?"

"D— Fireplace man!" she stuttered, barely catching herself from her slip with a hastily-recalled memory from her other self's time.

Just as promised, the Doctor immobilised the creature with Mickey's fire extinguisher, which he rapidly tossed back to the human— the only human in the room, amusingly enough.

The robot clicked, whirred, trying to force itself back into mobility.

"What's it doing?" Mickey asked. Reinette pressed her lips together; she'd forgotten how irritating he could be in this time period.

"Switching back on," answered the Doctor, not taking his eyes off of it. "Melting the ice."

"And then what?"

"Then it kills everyone in the room." His voice was vague, distracted; Rose could feel him searching, trying to pin down the frictionless ripple in the room that was her consciousness. She dodged him and he followed her, and their telepathic dance was such that the shock and fear when the robot reached out to him was far from being false— but he stepped back anyway, unfazed. Clearly he was better at multitasking than she was. "Focuses the mind, doesn't it? Who are you?" he added, voice hardening, the last words aimed at the robot alone as he finally gave up the chase— for the moment. "Identify yourself."

It tilted its head, mocking him. He sighed, rolling his head over to face Reinette— Rose.

_Ha! See, it's easier, isn't it? You did that earlier, too. _She was grinning, triumphant, as she mocked her future self.

_Rose _wanted to slap her previous self, but wasn't entirely sure how to go about it.

_Just try it, Camilla. You weren't the one who had the Bad Wolf in her head. You still don't know how to control your mind, do you?_

"Order it to answer me," the Doctor whined, interrupting her argument with herself.

"Why should it listen to _me?_" she asked with barely a hesitation. Now wasn't the time to figure out how to telepathically torture other facets of her own being.

He turned back around. "I don't know," he said. "It did when you were a child."

Rose felt her previous self— her _physical _previous self— staring at him. She knew her thoughts, knew her instinctive dislike for her future form, and squirmed lightly under the knowledge that the creature she had so bitterly hated was, in fact, herself.

Irony was an amazing thing.

"Let's see if you've still got it," he murmured in her ear, and she was almost too agitated to notice his closeness.

She let the first Rose think about that and, still stinging slightly from the accusation that she knew nothing about controlling her own mind, tried to cut herself off from the other version. The outdated version, she couldn't quite help but snap at her own consciousness, but all the other creature inhabiting her brain did was roll her metaphysical eyes and shake her metaphysical head.

"Answer his question," she ordered the robot, voice low and smooth. Perhaps it was too smooth, too easy for a woman who should, by all rights, be frightened out of her wits, but did it matter? "Answer any and all questions put to you." Out of the corner of her eye she saw her previous self glance over at her, then back at the clockwork creature, who paused.

It lowered its hand, obeying. "I am Repair Droid Seven," it informed them.

It was almost time. The adventure had nearly begun properly.

Reinette inhaled slowly, shakily, and waited for it.

_You did it again, _said Rose 1, insufferably smug again.

_Shut up._

-BAD WOLF-

Like I said, didn't get to the end of the episode, but you know what? I don't care. Muahaha.

Remember, I DO love you guys, despite my laziness. And I am starting to want to write fanfiction again, so my laziness may be short-lived. Huzzah!

Next up... ah... Ah, it's _The Sea. _Marvellous. -mild sarcasm-


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